The Changing Personality Of The Newspaper
From James Donahue’s Journal
The Times Herald was among the smallest of the daily newspapers in the massive Gannet chain. Consequently, it became a training ground for up-and-coming new recruits for top editorial positions. Thus, we endured an unending series of adjustments to new managing editors, city editors and even publishers throughout the years I worked on that newspaper.
It was inevitable that every new publisher and every new managing editor had to make dynamic changes in the way things were done. They not only shifted jobs and priorities for staff workers, but they changed the format of the newspaper, the emphasis on news content, and even changed type fonts. Thus the Times Herald lost its personality. We went through one of these extreme makeovers at least once a year. As a bureau reporter I escaped most of the frustration suffered by people in the newspaper offices, but some of it came my way anyway.
There were so many editors over the years I cannot remember them all. What I remember are the ones that caused the most difficulty. We had one managing editor, for example, that was a sports fiend. He arrived in the late summer, just before the high school football season opened. He called all staffers into a big meeting one day to announce that the newspaper was going to cover the area football games like never before. Every reporter was going to be assigned to cover specific football games on Friday nights and during the weekends.
I had been down that road before and knew that I not only disliked writing about athletic events, I found it very hard to understand the intricacies of the various plays. Because all of the players were bundled in thick uniforms so the only way to identify them was by their number, so I had a hard time figuring out who did what in a play or knowing if one play was more worthy of writing about than another. Also, when I hired in for the job, my old editor, Bernard Lyons had promised I never would have to cover sports events while on the bureau. I was going to be busy enough on that beat. I told this editor about my old agreement with Lyons. His response: “Are you saying you will hand in your resignation in the morning?” I said I did not mean that and would cover football games.
I think I attended two games. The sports editor found that he had to call the coaches the next day to make corrections and rewrite my stories. They quickly learned that trained government reporters do not necessarily make good sports reporters. I was eventually dismissed from having to cover football games.
That particular editor caused so much trouble, and started firing so many experienced staffers, that everybody felt threatened. It was not long before we were attending secret meetings at a Port Huron hotel and organizing for a vote on a guild. When the petition for a union vote was made known to management, we all went through a concerted effort by Gannet to head off this threat. We were individually wined and dined by the publisher at one of the finest restaurants in Port Huron. Also the editor that caused all of the trouble was transferred out and we saw or heard of him no more. With him out of the picture, the vote on the guild was defeated. That was all we wanted anyway.
I had some city editors I liked, and they seemed to like me. Other editors came along that were so disagreeable I had some real scraps with them. Bill Florence comes to mind as one of the very worse of those. Florence was a midget of a guy. He stood no more than five feet tall and I think he probably had some kind of a Napoleon complex. He would call me and demand that I drop everything and go on some ridiculous assignment when I felt what I was working on was much more important. He also inserted the word “that” into almost every line of my copy. I didn’t like this and asked him to stop tinkering like that with my copy. He insisted on continuing this strange behavior.
Once when Florence called and ordered me to do something I told him I would do it if he used the “magic word.” He didn’t get it at first. I couldn’t believe I had to explain that I simply wanted him to say “please.” He finally said it and I did the assignment.
While Florence was in that position, the newspaper was moved from its old building into the new one. The men’s restroom for the newsroom staff was equipped with two urinals. Strangely one was set at an adult level, but the other was low to the floor and obviously designed for children or midgets to use. The staff printed Florence’s name on the latter urinal.
In the midst of all of this turmoil, the newspaper began insisting that all staff members get a yearly evaluation by the editors. It was an extensive report that reviewed every aspect of our performance during the previous year. Once the report was ready, we all were called individually into the office to review it with our editor and write a response, then sign it. Obviously, my reports looked like a yo-yo, with my evaluation going from high to low from year to year, depending on how well I got along with the editor in training at that time. I took it as a joke most of the time and never let it bother me. I think it was Florence who wrote that my attitude was “jaded.”
Another conflict occurred when the newspaper began shifting its news content from government reporting to feature stories. While I usually liked good feature writing, I loved government reporting and believed that it was a newspaper’s responsibility to be a constant watchdog of government. What I did not realize was that this was a national trend among newspapers that was going to lead the nation on the downward spiral it took. Apparently, this was what journalism students were being taught in the nation’s colleges and universities. Was it some sort of conspiracy?
As one of the older reporters still working in the field, I had passed up opportunities to take editorial positions, I was an old-school journalist. I passed up those editorial jobs for two reasons. First, I liked working in the field better. And secondly, the people on those editorial jobs worked on salary. They made more money but they worked up to 12 hours a day and had little, if any home life.
I took a lot of heat for taking the stand I took on the issue of reporting on government. In the end, I was forbidden to attend even county board meetings. All I could do was call the clerks after each meeting, ask for a brief report on action taken during the meeting, and write brief paragraphs that were presented in boxes on the inside pages. Our front page was filled with what I called “fluff.” It was nonsensical bull-shit non-news that included such things as profiles of local football players, the interesting things a science class in a local school district was doing, and sometimes we were able to report on a fire or fatal car wreck. Today the publishing houses are wondering why people stopped reading newspapers.
Our readership was in radical decline while I still worked at the newspaper. I remember attending one of the “mandatory” staff meetings that were held all too often. (Every time I was ordered to attend one it cost about a day of work since I had to drive 50 miles just to get to the meeting, then 50 miles back.) A new publisher was in-house that day and he wanted input from everyone for ideas for boosting circulation. He went around the big table, forcing everyone to speak out. When it was my turn, I suggested getting back to reporting real news that people wanted and needed to know. I told them that my own teen-aged children never read our newspaper, even though I wrote stories that appeared in it every day. I received some cold blank stares. Then it was the next guy’s turn to speak.
From James Donahue’s Journal
The Times Herald was among the smallest of the daily newspapers in the massive Gannet chain. Consequently, it became a training ground for up-and-coming new recruits for top editorial positions. Thus, we endured an unending series of adjustments to new managing editors, city editors and even publishers throughout the years I worked on that newspaper.
It was inevitable that every new publisher and every new managing editor had to make dynamic changes in the way things were done. They not only shifted jobs and priorities for staff workers, but they changed the format of the newspaper, the emphasis on news content, and even changed type fonts. Thus the Times Herald lost its personality. We went through one of these extreme makeovers at least once a year. As a bureau reporter I escaped most of the frustration suffered by people in the newspaper offices, but some of it came my way anyway.
There were so many editors over the years I cannot remember them all. What I remember are the ones that caused the most difficulty. We had one managing editor, for example, that was a sports fiend. He arrived in the late summer, just before the high school football season opened. He called all staffers into a big meeting one day to announce that the newspaper was going to cover the area football games like never before. Every reporter was going to be assigned to cover specific football games on Friday nights and during the weekends.
I had been down that road before and knew that I not only disliked writing about athletic events, I found it very hard to understand the intricacies of the various plays. Because all of the players were bundled in thick uniforms so the only way to identify them was by their number, so I had a hard time figuring out who did what in a play or knowing if one play was more worthy of writing about than another. Also, when I hired in for the job, my old editor, Bernard Lyons had promised I never would have to cover sports events while on the bureau. I was going to be busy enough on that beat. I told this editor about my old agreement with Lyons. His response: “Are you saying you will hand in your resignation in the morning?” I said I did not mean that and would cover football games.
I think I attended two games. The sports editor found that he had to call the coaches the next day to make corrections and rewrite my stories. They quickly learned that trained government reporters do not necessarily make good sports reporters. I was eventually dismissed from having to cover football games.
That particular editor caused so much trouble, and started firing so many experienced staffers, that everybody felt threatened. It was not long before we were attending secret meetings at a Port Huron hotel and organizing for a vote on a guild. When the petition for a union vote was made known to management, we all went through a concerted effort by Gannet to head off this threat. We were individually wined and dined by the publisher at one of the finest restaurants in Port Huron. Also the editor that caused all of the trouble was transferred out and we saw or heard of him no more. With him out of the picture, the vote on the guild was defeated. That was all we wanted anyway.
I had some city editors I liked, and they seemed to like me. Other editors came along that were so disagreeable I had some real scraps with them. Bill Florence comes to mind as one of the very worse of those. Florence was a midget of a guy. He stood no more than five feet tall and I think he probably had some kind of a Napoleon complex. He would call me and demand that I drop everything and go on some ridiculous assignment when I felt what I was working on was much more important. He also inserted the word “that” into almost every line of my copy. I didn’t like this and asked him to stop tinkering like that with my copy. He insisted on continuing this strange behavior.
Once when Florence called and ordered me to do something I told him I would do it if he used the “magic word.” He didn’t get it at first. I couldn’t believe I had to explain that I simply wanted him to say “please.” He finally said it and I did the assignment.
While Florence was in that position, the newspaper was moved from its old building into the new one. The men’s restroom for the newsroom staff was equipped with two urinals. Strangely one was set at an adult level, but the other was low to the floor and obviously designed for children or midgets to use. The staff printed Florence’s name on the latter urinal.
In the midst of all of this turmoil, the newspaper began insisting that all staff members get a yearly evaluation by the editors. It was an extensive report that reviewed every aspect of our performance during the previous year. Once the report was ready, we all were called individually into the office to review it with our editor and write a response, then sign it. Obviously, my reports looked like a yo-yo, with my evaluation going from high to low from year to year, depending on how well I got along with the editor in training at that time. I took it as a joke most of the time and never let it bother me. I think it was Florence who wrote that my attitude was “jaded.”
Another conflict occurred when the newspaper began shifting its news content from government reporting to feature stories. While I usually liked good feature writing, I loved government reporting and believed that it was a newspaper’s responsibility to be a constant watchdog of government. What I did not realize was that this was a national trend among newspapers that was going to lead the nation on the downward spiral it took. Apparently, this was what journalism students were being taught in the nation’s colleges and universities. Was it some sort of conspiracy?
As one of the older reporters still working in the field, I had passed up opportunities to take editorial positions, I was an old-school journalist. I passed up those editorial jobs for two reasons. First, I liked working in the field better. And secondly, the people on those editorial jobs worked on salary. They made more money but they worked up to 12 hours a day and had little, if any home life.
I took a lot of heat for taking the stand I took on the issue of reporting on government. In the end, I was forbidden to attend even county board meetings. All I could do was call the clerks after each meeting, ask for a brief report on action taken during the meeting, and write brief paragraphs that were presented in boxes on the inside pages. Our front page was filled with what I called “fluff.” It was nonsensical bull-shit non-news that included such things as profiles of local football players, the interesting things a science class in a local school district was doing, and sometimes we were able to report on a fire or fatal car wreck. Today the publishing houses are wondering why people stopped reading newspapers.
Our readership was in radical decline while I still worked at the newspaper. I remember attending one of the “mandatory” staff meetings that were held all too often. (Every time I was ordered to attend one it cost about a day of work since I had to drive 50 miles just to get to the meeting, then 50 miles back.) A new publisher was in-house that day and he wanted input from everyone for ideas for boosting circulation. He went around the big table, forcing everyone to speak out. When it was my turn, I suggested getting back to reporting real news that people wanted and needed to know. I told them that my own teen-aged children never read our newspaper, even though I wrote stories that appeared in it every day. I received some cold blank stares. Then it was the next guy’s turn to speak.